any advice you guys could give me would be great; i feel impossibly overwhelmed by all this info.
Either machine will run OSX, though the G4 tower will definitely need more RAM. More is better...especially if you want to play with Photoshop and Painter.
If it is a Yikes model, then the most you can upgrade it to currently is a 500 mhz G4, half the speed of the iMac. This is definitely a factor with Painter, and somewhat with Photoshop (depending on what you're doing, of course)
On the plus side it has room inside for more storage devices, you can easily add another video card to span your desktop across two or more monitors (VERY handy for dealing with the rabble of windows that both Painter and Photshop have) which is something you cannot do with the iMac.
OTOH, if it's an AGP G4 (a sawtooth) hop on it like a rabid bunny...that's a damned good deal, and there are lots of faster-to-you processors on the market as people upgrade them, plus you can upgrade it quite significantly.
Long term, it's a wash, I think. The G4 is more upgradeable than the iMac, but the iMac is already better that what you could get the G4 to.
That said, an even better deal for you might well be for the refurb 1Ghz G4 currently at the Apple store for $1300, then spending $600 for a refurb 17" Studio display for a total of $1900 that you were going to spend on the iMac, and you'll have a far more upgradeable system in the long run...
-- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group
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